A Critical Discourse Analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Selected Poems: “Ode to the West Wind”; “Song: Men of England” and “The Cloud”

Percy Bysshe Shelley as a major English romantic poet and playwright was deeply concerned with his society and its social and political events and upheavals. His three selected poems in this study reflect his social concerns and are directly associated with their context and contain both in form and content discursive features. As an interdisciplinary and a new field of study, critical discourse analysis is concerned with analyzing and close reading of texts and also places weight on the active role of discourse in the construction of the social world. Norman Fairclough develops a model called CDA which is a three-dimensional method for analyzing discursive features of texts. By focusing on Norman Fairclough’s approach, this study investigates the three selected poems in a way that their discursive features within the formal, contextual and social framework become evident to the readers. To this end, this study has explored the wordings, rhymes, semantic relationships among the words and verses based on three dimensional method of Fairclough which includes description, interpretation and explanation stages. The study makes the suggested discourses of these three poems as well as their social and political implications evident to the readers.